Present Toil, Future Fruit
Written by: Kayla Shannon and Summer Fulcher
Have you ever questioned the point in what you’re doing or why the heck you are where you are?
Welcome to our lives for the last two weeks.
SHE has been undergoing a super transitional phase for the last couple of months. Things have been cray cray. We’ve moved our living location and shifted our ministry from being primarily relational to being mostly manual labor.
We felt like everything we’d worked for was slipping away. Instead of pouring out into the lives of others, our sweat was pouring out onto the dirt of Koh Sirey (the island we moved to). Yes, we are being very dramatic, but we recognize that…and in case you haven’t heard, it is hot here! So we were in a bit of a funk. Separately, we were both feeling majorly discouraged and beginning to question if our time in Thailand was a fruitless endeavor. We had both been crying out to the Lord for strength to continue. We were at the end of ourselves.
We were exhausted.
We were frustrated.
We were empty.
Wednesday night we had a conversation with a lady who was curious about our motivation behind doing bar ministry. She had a lot of questions, and surprisingly we had a lot of answers. Her questions were an attempt to understand why we would even want to work with these women who she sees as being there by choice. Through our explanations, we realized how much empathy and compassion we have for our friends on Bangla.
After talking with each other later that night we discovered we had both been struggling with the same doubts about our impact here.
Then came Thursday morning (here comes the sweet part).
The community got together to have intercession time for SHE. Coincidentally, we ended up in the same prayer group that was interceding for bar girls and long-term teams. Suddenly, the group asked to pray for the two of us.
And BOOM! The things the group prayed over us and the visions they saw spoke directly to the struggles of our last two weeks. Our minds were blown! We were so blessed by the truths they shared. They reminded us that God not only sees our work here, but is using it to further His kingdom here at SHE.
Basically we are stoked. Our passion for this place and what God is and will be doing is rekindled!
Yea, we might not physically see the fruit of the work we’ve put in here. But as we wind down our time here in Thailand, and even as we head home, we leave with HOPE.
We have hope that our God is crazy big and is still working in this place.
We have hope that our time here was for an eternal purpose.
We have hope that every team who comes to SHE will continue to be used by God to break the chains on Bangla!
